Case Study: Fortune 100 Global Aerospace

The competitive pressures brought on by the 4th Industrial Revolution are requiring a transformational change from long-established companies to remain competitive. Their test organizations are no exception and, fortunately, are locations of great opportunity for driving competitive advantage because of their effects on the cost and speed of key enterprise processes in engineering and manufacturing.

This is the story of how one company is winning the battle . . . with the support of The Sente Group.

The Challenge

The customer’s Aerospace division had completed several reorganizations focused on reducing costs and improving performance and they were looking for more. What they hadn’t fully explored was how to improve resource management within their complex and costly test organizations. A snapshot of their situation follows.

40+ facilities globally

An eclectic mix of categories of equipment: sharable & non-sharable, large fixed & portable, mechanical & electrical, company developed and COTS

With demand for capital out-stripping supply, there was a clear need and plenty of room for dramatic improvement.

The Solution

A Blueprint defined the essential elements of the solution which included an implementation plan and financial Pro-forma against which the team would measure future success. Phase one of the implementation focused on redeployable and sharable equipment because of its ubiquitous presence throughout the test process. The goal was to launch and test the Sente test resource management software Scireo® at one location, then implement it across the company.

Sente and the company’s in-house equipment management team worked together to audit existing equipment, set up the resource management structure – tailored processes, refined roles with metric responsibilities and Scireo® integrated software tools – and introduce it at the beta site in just two weeks. The integration would enable all of the different categories of equipment to be managed in one tool with performance enabled by powerful workflows designed specifically for each equipment category and being able to be consolidated into one view of all categories of equipment need for each test program.

It didn’t take long for company leaders to see that the new system was working, leading to a rapid rollout to key sites in North America:

14 additional locations

9-month implementation

Over 100,000 assets brought into the system

The keystone of the solution is Scireo®, the integrated software previously mentioned that measures utilization and provides real-time information on specific pieces of equipment – leading to smarter, more cost-effective decisions about every asset.

In addition, Sente’s detailed knowledge of the cultural dynamics that needed to be overcome led to quick adoption by labs and middle management as a mechanism to reduce costs.

The Results

The company-wide implementation of the TRM solution led to several rapid, significant improvements enabled by a resilient network of test capabilities producing visibility across the company that can be leveraged to reduce costs and increase speed. The results below include all categories of test capabilities. Some of the benefits include:

The cultural transformation from hoarding to collaboration is underway with assets being shared across the global network

Overall utilization increased to > 55% resulting in a significant improvement to the ability to fund new projects

Over 40% location-consolidation on targeted capabilities where Centers of Excellence were established and managed using Scireo®

Reduced equipment downtime over 30% with robust maintenance protocols

Responsiveness of test processed improved over 60%

Greater visibility to future resource constraints and available contingencies across multiple locations, enabling planning based on knowledge of resource dependencies

All laboratories now share standard processes and tools for scheduling the capacity of all different equipment categories.

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